Monday, 9 March 2015

No Rest for the Wicked - When Angels Fall

This weekend was my first field LRP experience, crewing in a No Rest for the Wicked event at Castle Featherstone near Haltwhistle.

The Castle is in many ways an awesome venue, but it is right up in the borders, in the middle of nowhere and it's an old (but not ancient) listed building. Since I was up there with +Ian Porter this meant that there were significant access issues for him, as well as a four hour drive (of which I slept two either way.)

We arrived on Friday afternoon and helped with prep before briefings and dinner. I was a largely silent partner in the Inquisitorial meeting, since I didn't have much background on the business at hand, but it was quite fun just watching +Rob Collins heave to as the Lord Inquisitor and I had provided some of the IC paperwork that +Jamie Smith was given (including the encrypted copy of Wordsworth's Daffodils that he painstakingly decoded. I played Inquisitor Daedalus of the Ordo Malleus as a grumpy, slightly puckish veteran, largely because I knew my other main role was going to be a complete stiff.

I asked +syen iess's PC to look into whether the Lord-Militant (Ian's main NPC) had been cursed or hexed, but in retrospect I was way too oblique and by the morning word was going around that he was making deals with the forces of chaos. Oops.

I largely failed to bring that other character in on Friday, as I was too tired to drum up the confidence to break in on PC conversations. Huge thanks to +Timothy Edwards for providing someone for my self-entitled failure to bounce off. We blamed the weather on the 'harmonic convergence' and moved away from the windows at one point.

Towards the end of the night I was in the crew room while a group of crew ran through the ritual I wrote up for their cultist NPCs. They didn't stick completely to the script, but if I'd realised that they were going to perform the ritual rather than have people turn up the notes, I wouldn't have required the victim to be 'clad in naught but skin' in the first place.

On Saturday my rubbish politico basically got rolled on by the PCs. First the Inquisition got heavy with local politics (my guy didn't have the leverage to fight this, but the outraged response from the other noble NPCs was excellent) and then, having made the first selfless decision of his life, he was arrested because someone told one of the Lord-Captains that he was trying to steal her thunder (+Hazel King has made no bones about her PC's motivation, but I share Rob's disappointment that we just didn't have time to run the arrest as a linear.)

This took him out of play from the afternoon on, so I played Daedalus again for a bit. Finding evidence of heresy he joined a snatch raid to arrest another of the planetary nobles, inadvertently shifting the mission to a live capture. I promptly handed her over to the Ordo Hereticus, who failed to give a fuck as they seemed to be distracted trying to take control of a planet, or something. This was just part of the whole socio-political sector of the game swinging wildly off book; two of the three candidates for planetary governor ended up arrested on the PCs' orders and there were serious plans to cosh the third and take her off-world for her own protection. I don't think any of their dark secrets were actually unveiled, largely because no-one actually felt the need to get a handle on them.

I switched to my third NPC, an adventurous Navigator, for the Navigators' party, which had some culinary grotesquerie (gummi worms in advocat) and lots of cool storytelling; we ended up comparing the death cults which seem to spring up in the bowels of the 40Kverse's vast voidships with embarrassing regularity.

I had planned to go to bed after that, but instead I ended up dressing as a fishman and menacing players in company of a ratman and a giant lobster. How I managed to ambush PCs in that suit I do not know. Also, the head came off as I did my last death, so they carried it away with them. The whole thing was the highlight of the weekend for me, even if it did leave me knackered the next morning. Pictures of this will follow as soon as I get them (+Ben Brown - Catriona has a lot of pics; could you pass on my email?)

On Sunday I played Daedalus again, and finally got some PCs to bring me things. Sadly not an actual daemonhost - I think they took those to the Hereticus and they were already dead before I could spirit them away to the maximum fun chamber - but I did get a partial host and a set of notes. I also got to bring a heavy bolter to a party (explaining 'it looks like it's turning out to be one of those sorts of party.')

And then home, which took a long time (drive, plus a couple of hours on train and bus) but ended with a series of notes from +Johanna Scott-Bennett reminding me to look after myself.